The NFL's Meathead Chorus Needs to Grow Up

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The NFL praised its players yesterday for not killing each other this week. No one was paralyzed; only Tony Romo's clavicle and Mike Singletary's desk lamp ended up broken. Up became down, and villains became heroes. Pittsburgh's James Harrison decided he wanted to keep playing football after all — choosing not to work late-night security at an Indian casino instead — and even he showed restraint on a play when he might have otherwise taken a few years off Ronnie Brown's life.

Of course, the Meathead Chorus has continued bleating about the ruination of their beloved game, that the league has done only the politically correct thing — trying belatedly to prevent its employees from becoming vegetables later in the life — and that we might as well be watching two-hand touch.

I received plenty of e-mails after last week's post about the NFL's looming Judgment Day. Most of them, somehow, contained defenses for things like the helmet-to-helmet hit. One reader told me that if the NFL began suspending players for illegal hits, then "they might as well stop playing the game."

I don't understand. No, I've never played a down of organized football in my life — because, you know, you can't have an opinion about politics unless you've been a politician — but really? Even MMA doesn't allow fingers in open cuts. At some point, a line has to be drawn, doesn't it?

I'm positive the NFL will soon face a massive lawsuit from a former player, from someone like Ted Johnson, who won three Super Bowl rings with the New England Patriots but suffered, by his estimate, perhaps more than a hundred concussions. He spent two years of his life after retirement in his bed in the dark. He will almost certainly die younger than he might have, and he will almost certainly be plagued by his injuries until he finally earns his ultimate release. It's even odds that the day will come when he can't remember the names of his kids.

I can't imagine even the most jacked-up fan arguing that's okay, and yet e-mail after e-mail informed me that if players die young in a puddle of their own drool, they knew the deal when they first stepped on the field.

Smokers knew the deal, too, and Big Tobacco still paid out.

That's because you can't peddle an early death and not expect to pay for it — and in the NFL's case, especially when it's not even a necessary part of the product. Tobacco is born with nicotine in it. Football willfully cultivated its more concussive violence and then did nothing, until a week ago, to try to curb it.

And now the league has probably made itself even more vulnerable to legal action by showing how easy it was to prevent the worst of the violence in the end.

Did you miss the illegal hits? Did you long to see someone carted off on a backboard? Did you go to bed on Sunday night wishing that you had watched someone lose the feeling in his arms and legs? Did you turn off your TV in disgust when you realized that you weren't going to see a hit that would leave both the giver and the taker that much closer to death?

Of course you didn't. In the not-so-distant future, football's last few seasons will be regarded the way we remember smoking on planes. Hard and clean aren't mutually exclusive options: Just ask a guy like Derrick Brooks. This last weekend was a good weekend for the game, and it was a good weekend for its players — with the notable exception of Brett Favre and his various parts.

Remember when he might have retired at the end of 2007 as one of the all-time greats, as an icon in Green Bay, as an iron horse and a family man?

How could it have gone so horribly wrong?

Because sometimes even grown men go too far. Sometimes they have to be shown the beauty of restraint. Sometimes they have to be taught the value of limits. Sometimes they have to be made to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, to be reminded of the importance of scope.

Sometimes, even grown men — even great men — need to be told when enough is enough.